After Newtown massacre, mother urges compassion in schools

Scarlett Lewis. whose 6-year-old son was among the 20 children murdered in the Newtown school shooting, spoke at Seattle’s first Compassionate Schools Conference, held at Cleveland High School on Tuesday. Photo by Bettina Hansen / The Seattle Times.

Scarlett Lewis’s 6-year-old son, Jesse, was among the 20 children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. On Tuesday, the 46-year-old single mother spoke to Education Lab about her journey from despair to forgiveness for shooter Adam Lanza, and the surprising power she discovered through practicing compassion.

Q: You talk about creating compassionate schools. How would they be different from traditional schools?

A: I see compassion woven into regular lessons in each classroom. There can be compassion in science, in math, in English on a daily basis. I think we assume that compassion is taught in the home, but when I look back on raising my own boys, I don’t remember ever sitting down and specifically teaching a lesson about compassion. This needs to be consistent across society — not only in schools, but in our homes, our governments, our hospitals, our police departments. And this isn’t just a feel-good movement. We know that compassion actually helps corporations’ bottom line.

Q: How do you actually teach someone to be compassionate?

A: Mindfulness is one way. I talk a lot about gratitude and service to others. I also talk a lot about frustration. Jesse’s older brother, JT, was 12 at the time of the shooting, and we had some frustration receiving help from the school in Newtown. They said we weren’t trained in trauma, but I said we were just looking for human compassion.

JT wouldn’t go back to school, and I couldn’t force him because I had sent one child, and he didn’t come home. So we were just there in the house together, immobile, in despair, both angry. We weren’t able to move forward.

Then this woman from Rwanda said there were two orphaned genocide survivors, kids, who wanted to Skype with us. One of them had watched her whole family butchered by neighbors when she was 8. They’d slit her throat and buried her in a shallow grave before she crawled out and found her way to an orphanage. This was something quite possibly worse than what we’d endured. She said she wanted to tell us that we were going to be OK. “You are going to feel joy again,” she said. That was so profound to us because we really weren’t sure.

Jesse Lewis, 6, wrote the words “nurturing, healing, love” on a chalkboard in his home before being murdered by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

Q: You say compassion is love. Do you love Adam Lanza? If he hadn’t killed himself what would you say to him?

A: Do I love him? I’m working toward that. But yes, I do feel compassion for him. That is how I can forgive. It’s not that I don’t fall back into anger — I do. But I choose to forgive again. I do feel that he was let down by society, and I would tell him that. Because he was not born a mass murderer. I know that he reached out for help and was not given the help that he needed to overcome his feelings of anger. If he had been given that, this never would have happened.

And of course there’s his mother, who armed him. That’s another person who needs to be forgiven. What did I know about forgiveness on Dec. 13? I just knew that you should do it. What I’ve learned is that it’s for yourself. You do it to release your anger and move forward in peace.

I would tell him that I forgive him, but that he would have to forgive himself, and that’s the hardest thing to do.

Stories in the series

When tackling the topic of student discipline, some of the country’s toughest schools have done a turnaround. Instead of focusing on rules broken, they now ask kids to confront themselves. The result? Fewer suspensions and new perspective on the point of school itself. Read the story →

It stands to reason: Kick troubled students out of school and they often come back even worse. The Kent School District is trying to tackle this national problem by overhauling the way it handles discipline. But its answers spark even more questions. Read the story →

In an idea borrowed from college athletics, the University of Washington boosts promising engineering students — many of them women and minorities — with an extra year of academic work. Read the story →

Boosting the quality of preschool in Seattle could help children, and the city as a whole. A number of studies, including one from the ’60s, establish that potential. But there is no guarantee of success. Read the story →

Universal, free preschool in Tulsa, Okla., has produced results attracting national attention, and could be a blueprint for Seattle. But after 16 years the long-term outcomes raise almost as many questions as they answer. Read the story →

Communication failures both within Seattle Public Schools and with parents of children with disabilities continue to undermine the district’s efforts to fix longstanding problems in special education. Read the story →

A new focus on individualized advice and counseling, boosted by software tools, is helping hundreds more students earn degrees and certificates each year at Walla Walla Community College. Read the story →

The path to college often leaves disadvantaged students behind. Two unusual nonprofits, one based in Seattle, have helped vault thousands of low-income students onto university campuses. Read the story →

In an attempt to add depth to the curriculum in America's most popular advanced high-school courses, some local teachers threw out most of their lectures and replaced them with a series of projects. Results so far are encouraging. Read the story →

Western Washington University college students are working as mentors, tutors and role models for thousands of K-12 students in and around Bellingham. The goal: convince them that college should be part of their educational trajectory. Read the story →

Kent educators combed through transcripts and discovered 2,600 young people in their district without any kind of diploma or credential. Enter iGrad, a program linking dropouts with college, that has been flooded with kids who want a second chance. Read the story →

A community group in northwest Chicago has turned hundreds of hesitant parents into capable classroom helpers, role models and leaders by tapping into strengths many don't realize they have. Read the story →

Missing just a few days of class in sixth grade can predict whether you'll graduate from high school. That research powers a national anti-dropout effort that's making a difference at Seattle's Aki Kurose and Denny International middle schools. Read the story →

For years, students at White Center Heights Elementary logged some of the lowest test scores in King County. Then teachers tried something new, and the numbers soared by double-digits after just one year. So what happened, and could it be replicated elsewhere? Read the story →

About the authors

John Higgins is one of Education Lab's reporters. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2012 to 2013.

Katherine Long has been a reporter for The Seattle Times since 1990, focusing for the past three years on higher ed, with stories that have ranged from the complexities of prepaid tuition programs to nontraditional ways to earn a degree.

Claudia Rowe joined The Seattle Times’ reporting staff in 2013. She has written about education for The New York Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, among other publications.

Leah Todd is an education reporter at The Times. She previously covered education for the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming.

Mike Siegel has been a news photographer at the Seattle Times since 1987. His photography was used in a series titled "Methadone and the Politics of Pain," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for investigative reporting.

Linda Shaw is The Times’ education editor. Previously, she covered public education as a reporter at The Seattle Times for more than two decades. Her coverage has won numerous national and local awards and honors.

Caitlin Moran is community engagement editor for Education Lab. She came to The Times from Patch, where she spent three years managing hyperlocal news websites on the Eastside.

About Solutions Journalism Network

The Education Lab project is being done with the support of the Solutions Journalism Network. SJN is a non-profit organization created to legitimize and spread the practice of solutions journalism: rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.